Kenny eBook

And she was gone. Kenny lay back in his chair
and closed his eyes; the sound of her flying feet
death in his ears.

CHAPTER XLI

WHEN THE ISLE OF DELIGHT RECEDED

Often Kenny had appreciatively dramatized for himself
possible minutes of tragedy. They were always
opportunities for Shakespearian soliloquy and gesture.

Now he lay back in his chair much too tired for tragedy
and gesture. And the need of soliloquy would
have found him dumb. Upper-most in his mind
was a dream in which Joan had peeped down at him from
a balloon that went ever and ever higher—­like
the Isle of Delight that was always—­receding.
He had sensed in her to-night that aerial aloofness
he had felt when he blocked old Adam out from his
dream of love. Liebestraum! The stabbing
pain in his heart grew hotter.

It was lonely here in the pines. He wondered
why he had never caught before that chill pervading
sense of solitude—­sad solitude. The
pines whispered. It was not merely poetry.
They whispered plaintively. . . . And he was
very tired.

Rebellion came flaming into his apathy and Kenny caught
his breath and held it, fiercely striking his hands
together again and again. Sacrifice and suffering!
Must it be like this? What had he written in
his notebook anyway? He seemed almost to have
forgotten.

The book opened at a touch to the page he wanted.

“Sunsets and vanity,” he read drearily
and penciled the rebuke away with a faint smile.
Like his hairbrained, unquenchable youth, bright with
folly, the sunsets and vanity lay in the past.
Vanity! Ah, dear God! he could not feel humbler.

Nor was he irresponsible—­or a failure as
a parent. He had made good to-night. Surely,
surely, he had made good to-night. The one thing
that he might not mark out was his failure as a painter.

“Need to suffer and learn something of the psychology
of sacrifice.” Well, he was—­learning.
. . . Nay, he had learned. Kenny fiercely
drew his pencil through the sentence and read the
rest.

The truth, though he did not fully understand it,
he would always try to tell. He had no debts.
The chairs in the studio were cleared of litter.
A plebeian regularity had made him uncomfortably provident.

So much for that part of his self-arraignment.
One by one he marked the items out and stared with
a twisted smile at the next.

“I borrow Brian’s girls, his money and
his clothes!” Hum! Once Garry had barked
at him for sending orchids to a girl or two whom Brian
liked.

The money, the clothes, the paraphernalia he had pawned,
were returned. As for the girls—­well,
Brian had retaliated in kind and perhaps the debt
in its concentration of payment, was abundantly squared.